MyCareer.com.au

Hibernate deal opens way to make open source pay

The Australian-led Hibernate free software project has attracted financial
backing from a US commercial vendor, in exchange for premium customer service.
Gavin King and his colleague Christian Bauer have joined the payroll of JBoss
Inc, a software infrastructure company based in Georgia, US. King says selling
his expert knowledge of the project he founded 21/2 years ago, will help fund
the project's ongoing development.

Hibernate automatically translates information contained in systems written
in Java, into relational databases - while JBoss provides an "application
server" platform to run them on.

"The JBoss company is trying to implement a model of professional open
source," King says, "where open source developers can make projects and eat at
the same time. A lot of open source projects are provided with no warranty, with
no company standing behind it with response teams and 7x24 service or training.
So Hibernate is now supported by JBoss, by me and Christian from the Hibernate
team."

King says the company has already recouped the two developers' salaries in
consulting fees.

However, this open source patronage model benefits the commercial software
vendor in other ways too. JBoss actually incorporates Hibernate within its own
product, so having its two lead programmers on board ensures tight integration.
It also gives JBoss an introduction to its competitors' customers - Java
programmers using IBM's WebSphere, BEA's Web Logic and Oracle's 9iAS application
servers.

So by starting a successful open source project, King has effectively
delivered JBoss an opening to thousands of Java application server users around
the world. And now King gets a good night's sleep.

"Six months ago, I was in a difficult position with a day job," King
says.

"I developed Hibernate at night. I'm a permanent employee of JBoss now. As
the commercial aspect grows, we can hire more people to work on the open source
full-time. When I was doing this by myself, I had no life. I didn't sleep. I had
two jobs."

King says people look at Linux as the prime example and conclude open source
development isn't innovative. But he argues operating systems are a commodity
item anyway and there is a lot of other innovation in open source software
that's under the media's radar. The patronage he now enjoys is perhaps a good
way to fund open source research and development. Hibernate's code base has six
main contributors but, as the product matures, with new features being added
less frequently, King finds himself busier than ever on things other than
coding.

"Most of the work in an open source project is not development but answering
user questions and maintaining the website," he says.

"There are a lot of things to do that makes it a project, not a program,
such as writing books, documentation, presenting at conferences and user
groups."

Although the two lead contributors are now JBoss employees, all the Hibernate
code is still subject to open source's perpetual free software licensing. This
means anyone can take the source code for free and "fork" it into another open
source project if they so desire.

But King believes professional support with the optional backing of a
commercial vendor will help ensure his project's continuing success.

"I didn't envisage this as a project done purely for the intellectual
enjoyment of it," he says.

"Right from the start I wanted to have a serious project for serious
business applications. So right from the start we had good documentation,
because that's often not the case with open source software. We don't want to be
seen as a cheap solution. When you choose to use Hibernate, you choose to use
something that's better than any commercial software. We love doing it but it's
a product, not a hobby."

With this kind of attitude, serious open source developers might find serious
patronage from commercial vendors hoping to attract open source users to their
platforms.